Apologies for leaving you hanging. It’s now almost three weeks since I published the first part of this post, and I’m sure you’ve been holding your breath ever since. There’s been a lot going on since the last post. First, my favorite sports team in the world, San Antonio Spurs, won their fifth NBA championship from the defending champs, Miami Heat. Next, my wife and I moved to our new house, and we’ve been remodeling ever since.

Continue reading

It’s time to dig into my tip library for some pretty cool things you can do with Google Tag Manager to enhance your site tagging. Some of these are macro magic through and through, some of these are best practices, and some of these are things that will make your life easier while managing a tag management solution. I’ve split this post into two parts to make it more Hobbit and less Lord Of the Rings length-wise.

Continue reading

That’s right, I changed the name! Huge thanks to Paul Gailey for the inspiration. Get the latest version of GTM Sonar here. Just a minor update this time. I added some informative text to the pop-up, along with an error screen if something goes wrong. Another change is that now when an element is added to debugDL, a counter on the Browser Action icon will start climbing, representing the number of objects in the array.

Continue reading

(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.) I updated my Chrome Extension, GTM Auto-Event Listener Debugger v1.1. I released the first version a couple of days ago. The extension can be used to debug Google Tag Manager’s auto-event tracking and its compatibility with web page markup. Download the latest version here. I did some major changes, and here’s the rundown. I transferred all debugger actions into a pop-up, which opens when you click the Browser Action.

Continue reading

(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.) Many of the Google Tag Manager articles on this blog could be considered hacks, in that they extend the out-of-the-box features of GTM in ways that will surely not be officially supported by Google. The crux of the problem is that lots of folks are taken by surprise when GTM refuses to work properly on their site, or when they have trouble tracking key elements on the page template.

Continue reading

Over the last couple of posts I’ve mainly been doing proof-of-concept (POC) tests with Google Tag Manager. The great thing about a POC is that you don’t really need to have any viable results or insight-driving technological innovations. The point is to showcase some feature of the platform on which the experiment was conducted. In this post, I’ll take a care-free step into the world of POCs again. My goal is to do a simple split test in order to identify which variant of a landing page (or key element thereof) produces the most conversions.

Continue reading

Let’s say you want to set up a rudimentary email alert system in your Google Tag Manager implementation. Say, for example, you want to receive an email every time an uncaught error occurs on your website. It’s not a very good use case, since a large website can spawn hundreds of uncaught exceptions in a short period of time, but let’s just pretend for now. If you know your JavaScript, you’ll know that you can’t send mail using client-side code.

Continue reading